Captain Jack Harkness (timeaftertime) wrote in seasidecafe, @ 2009-02-11 22:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | growing old |
Captain Jack Harkness: Growing Old
Growing old. Aging.
... Hell.
Jack has plenty he could say about it, but none of it is something he wants to say. Growing old, aging process, time travel— yeah, fantastically cheerful stuff. Growing old? Doesn't apply to him, he thinks. What aging process? Maybe in a long, long time from now he'll have a few more fine lines, a few more grey hairs mixed with the brown, but that seems to be all the aging his body's capable of and maybe it's just stress wearing on him a bit, no real cellular degeneration. And even the stress lines that suggest a bit of aging of a history of laughing a lot smooth out so much when he's truly relaxed, so he's not sure if they count, either. Growing old is something other people do because they're mortal and he isn't.
Then again, he hasn't even seen much of other people growing old, not truly. He only spent the first couple decades of his life around Boeshane, and that wasn't much time to see anyone age considerably. His father never got the chance; his mother, no idea, aged quicker than usual by grief but never old in the time he knew her, and he has no idea how long she might've lived to be. And— Gray. Yeah. A kid, and then some twenty years later for Gray and over a century for Jack, jumped to psychotic adulthood. Estelle had been a young woman when Jack knew and loved her, and then when he knew her again, an old woman, missing the gradual aging decades in between. Seeing pictures and films of royalty aging over the decades wasn't like seeing someone you knew, although he'd hit on a couple of them from time to time. With everyone around him in Torchwood dying young, Jack has no idea what it's really like to see someone he knows aging from young to old and he can't experience it himself.
If he had the choice of aging? Yeah, he much prefers being locked into his looks to growing older. It'd really suck to be a withered old man forever, much better having his strength and looks still. The very gradual aging, though, has him worried. Maybe someday he'll be that.
Not something he's going to tell just anyone about, though. As far as most of them know— obviously the Doctor and Ianto are exceptions with how he feels about them, and "Death" is, well, yeah, knows otherwise because that's what that being does. He isn't going to consider for long the one who knows differently from testing out his resurrecting over and over. The rest of them, though, can just go on thinking he's as mortal as them. It isn't a good idea for them to know otherwise.
He clears his throat and smiles in a way that doesn't really touch his eyes. "Do any of us really have a choice about the aging process?" Or lack thereof. "Not counting Data's systems, of course. And come on, just look at me. Who wouldn't want to look this good as long as they could? That's about all I've got to say about that. Although, time travel? I don't know what our favorite waitress thinks time travel's going to do for aging. If you do a lot of time travelling, yeah, your body will accumulate a lot more artron energy, undergo cellular changes, develop a really improved immune system. A friend of mine got in a tough spot because someone figured that out about her and— anyway, besides the point, point is that you aren't going to erase the aging you've already done with time travel."